Tyrants, who are usually expert in doing the numbers, often fear poets because they cut through the shallow, the cheap and the brutal

After a few dramatic weeks in world news, 21 March came as a relief. It hosted special days that attended to less dramatic but no less deeply human concerns. They commemorated Down syndrome and poetry.

In conversation about Down syndrome two opposed judgments are usually heard. One sees it as pitiable and a burden on parents and society that ideally would have been eliminated by discovering the condition early and terminating the pregnancy. This view is not new. It was held in many ancient cultures.

The other view sees people with Down syndrome as a gift to be treasured. Through them we learn and celebrate what is deepest in our humanity. They bear the image of the King in their dignity as unique and precious human beings.

The latter view was on show when Michelle Payne won the 2015 Melbourne Cup — Australia's most famous annual Thoroughbred horse race — on the long-shot Prince of Penzance.

Even the many thousands of people who had lost their money on the race were delighted at the unbridled joy they saw in Stevie, Michelle's brother and strapper, who has Down syndrome.

They responded to the love that bound him to his sister and family, and to his patent joy in the skill he brought to his work.

He, like so many people born with Down syndrome, has clearly been as great a gift to his family as they are to him. They, like many other families, may see his condition as a gift.

A very testing gift, certainly, one which will also sometimes be experienced by the person and their families as a burden, but will also be prized as a gift that deepens all those touched by it.

It makes available large and simple words that ring true only when tested by hard experience.

Words like goodness and generosity that call into question the conventional wisdom that people's value can be measured by their contribution to the economy, by their intelligence, their articulacy or their wealth and status.

In the company of people with Down syndrome we may be teased into softening the hard edges in our relationships which make plausible such calculating assumptions.

We see that love makes notable people who may seem at first sight marginal, recognises a gift that may lie hidden, and enables us to celebrate wholeheartedly the simplest and apparently most inconsequential aspects of our relationships.

Complex relationships between vulnerability and gift

That discovery of a simple humanity in turn can bring a greater benefit to society than any professional or economic success we may have.

Poetry, too, is about recognising depth and value in people, the world and our experience, which we could easily dismiss as ordinary and even useless.

It encourages us to attend carefully to the music behind the notes, to struggle to catch words for what lies beyond words, to find beauty in the apparently nondescript, pattern in the apparently random, and depth in the apparently trivial.

Poetry also challenges any idea that real value can be measured and calculated, and that we can judge the worth of people by their intelligence, their achievements and their wealth. By any quantitative criteria writing and reading can be assessed as an unprofitable and inefficient use of time.

Although poetry may be useless, however, it is valuable. Tyrants, who are usually expert in doing the numbers, often fear poets because they cut through the shallow, the cheap and the brutal. We need only think of Stalin and Osip Mandelstam. He feared poets as he feared doctors: both quietly notice symptoms that others miss.

Like people whose lives are touched by Down syndrome, poets can also tease out the threads of complex relationships between vulnerability and gift. Australian poet Francis Webb, who suffered from mental illness, caught beautifully the depth of humanity in the most vulnerable of human beings, whether himself or a new born child.

He reflects on holding a five day old child at Christmas time: 'If this is man, then the danger / And fear are as lights of the inn, / Faint and remote as sin / Out here by the manger. / In the sleeping, weeping weather / We shall all kneel down together.'

To devote the same day to reflection on both Down syndrome and on poetry, though probably unintended, was a very human thing to do.

Precisely because the one is so commonly regarded as a defect and the other as an idle activity, we need to be reminded that both are a gift. In times of tumult, violence and declamation they recall us to the simplicities and the depth of being human.

Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.

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